The “old man” was angry. His lips were pursed, his head held high, his Olympian gaze stony. When Nelson Mandela finally started speaking, his words were even more clipped than usual. This was not an irrational fury. Rather, it was the admonitory wrath of a headmaster. It was infused with the empathy of one who appreciated all too well the rage of his audience, yet knew that if South Africa was somehow to emerge intact from the ravages of apartheid it had to be tamed.
“老人”愤怒了。他撅着嘴唇，高昂着头，目光威严而坚定。当纳尔逊•曼德拉(Nelson Mandela)终于开始说话时，他的言语比往常更加简短干脆。这不是失去理智的怒火，而是一个领袖警告式的愤怒。曼德拉的话充满体谅；他深知听众们的怒火，但他也明白：如果南非要安然无恙地从种族隔离的疮痍中走出，就必须要平抑这股怒火。
It was August 1993. Three and a half blood-soaked years had passed since that diamond-bright afternoon when Mandela was released after 27 years in prison under apartheid. The first all-race elections set for the following April seemed impossibly distant against the backdrop of threats of secession from the white Afrikaner right and daily bloodshed in the townships. Before Mandela in a ramshackle stadium in one of Johannesburg’s desolate townships, thousands of “comrades” rattled makeshift weapons and bayed for revenge. Scores had died in the previous few days in street battles against a rival party. Yet the silver-haired septuagenarian gave no ground.
这是1993年8月。距离曼德拉获释的那个钻石般耀眼的下午已经三年半了，曼德拉在种族隔离制度下度过了27年牢狱生涯后出狱，但此后的南非却沐浴了血雨腥风。在南非右翼白人威胁分离、市镇里每天爆发流血冲突的背景下，定于1994年4月举行的不分种族大选似乎遥不可及。曼德拉讲话的地点是约翰内斯堡一座荒凉小镇上的破旧体育场，他面对的是成千上万名挥舞着简易武器、高呼报仇口号的“同志们”。就在此前几天，许多人在与敌对党派的巷战中丧生。但这名70多岁的银发老人态度坚决。
“If you have no discipline, you are not freedom fighters and we do not want you in our organisation,” he said in his distinctive reedy tones.
“如果没有纪律，你们就不是自由战士，我们的组织不需要你们这样的人，”曼德拉用他那独特而尖锐的嗓音说道。
“I am your leader. If you don’t want me, tell me to go and rest. As long as I am your leader I will tell you where you are wrong.” He stared, they muttered, shuffled their feet – and backed down.
“我是你们的领袖。如果你们不需要我，那就让我离开休息。只要我是你们的领袖，我就会指出你们的错误。”他凝视着人群。人群嘟哝着，跺着脚，但还是听从了曼德拉的命令。
For long years Mandela had been a shadowy symbol of hope, known only from his fiery record in the 1950s and 1960s, his inspirational speech from the dock when on trial for his life, and a grainy picture of him in the exercise yard on Robben Island prison in Cape Town’s Table Bay. As the day of his release in February 1990 had drawn near, some confidants worried he might disappoint. Many in the African National Congress were outraged he had been negotiating with the apartheid rulers and feared he had gone soft. Business people fretted he would be a Rip van Winkle figure clinging to the socialism he had espoused before being imprisoned. He had, after all, a record as something of a firebrand.
多年来，曼德拉象征着希望，但只是个模糊的影子——人们只知道他在二十世纪五六十年代轰轰烈烈的斗争活动，在码头受审（被判处终身监禁）时那鼓舞人心的讲话，以及他在开普敦桌湾(Table Bay)罗本岛监狱操场的斑驳照片。随着他在1990年2月出狱的日期临近，一些心腹密友曾担心他可能会让人失望。许多非国大(ANC)成员不满他与施行种族隔离的统治者谈判，担心他的立场软化。商界害怕他成为瑞普•凡•温克尔(Rip van Winkle)那样的人，在出狱后坚持自己在入狱前支持的社会主义。毕竟，他有着从事激进活动的记录。
How wrong they all were. Far from embittering or ossifying him, captivity had steeled him for the challenges ahead, he made clear. While unbending when he wanted to be, as his sometime adversary FW de Klerk ruefully recalls, and deeply loyal to ANC traditions, he had the vision and courage time and again to break with his party’s orthodoxies – in particular over negotiating with his jailers, and jettisoning socialism. He was to be even more remarkable than the ANC had suggested. His history as a freedom fighter and political prisoner was merely the warm-up act to his greatest role of all: the apostle of reconciliation who would seduce the Afrikaners into relinquishing power and lead South Africa back into the world.
他们大错特错。曼德拉明确表示，牢狱生涯既没让他心生怨恨，也没令他头脑僵化，而是锻炼了他，让他坚强地面对眼前的挑战。他曾经的敌人德克勒克(FW de Klerk)曾经感伤地回忆道，虽然曼德拉会在下定决心时毫不妥协，并且深深恪守非国大的传统，但他有远见、有勇气，不止一次打破非国大的正统做法——尤其是与囚禁自己的人谈判以及放弃社会主义这两件事。曼德拉比非国大描述的还要非凡。自由战士和政治犯的经历，不过是为他最伟大的角色做铺垫罢了：他成为民族和解的领路人，劝诱南非白人交出权力，引领南非重回世界怀抱。
In the bleak years between his release and democracy he was an itinerant prophet of reconciliation, delivering homily after homily intended to bind his divided nation together. He could be a ponderous speaker. Yet the force of his leadership far outweighed his oratory. One day he would lecture enraged radicals. The next he would address white irredentists. Time and again, all but the most embittered would balk at confronting him as he worked his magic: one moment grand and aloof, every inch the descendant of his family’s chiefly clan, the next joking and teasing, the ultimate street politician yet always a model of old-fashioned courtesy. Now that the country has safely navigated 19 years of democracy it is too easy to forget there was nothing inevitable about South Africa’s fairy tale.
在曼德拉获释和南非实现民主化之间的艰难岁月中，他扮演起民族和解先知的角色，奔波于各地，发表一场场演说，以期将这个分裂的国家团结起来。他的言辞或许沉闷，但他的领导力远比演说有力。第一天，他还在劝导愤怒的激进分子；第二天，他便在对意欲收复失地的白人晓以利害。曼德拉上演着自己的魔法：上一刻，他高贵淡然，浑身散发部落统治家族后代的气息；下一刻，他幽默风趣，将街头政治家的手段发挥到极致，但举止间总不乏老式的礼貌。正因此，人们总是不愿顶撞他（除了那些怨气最深的人）。南非已经安然度过了19年的民主时期，这让我们很容易忘记一点：南非的童话并不是听任历史发展就有的必然结果。
His unwavering style of leadership has led many to regard him as a modern Gandhi. Yet while he at times revelled in the rapture, this description irked him. He was the first to say he was not a saint. He after all championed the ANC’s adoption of the “armed struggle” – even if this was initially a largely symbolic move. He neglected his family in pursuit of his drive to end apartheid, a source of deep sadness later in his life. He was to the end an immensely human figure who loved life and laughter and was subject to the same weaknesses and foibles as the rest of us.
曼德拉坚韧的领导风格令许多人将他视为现代版的甘地(Gandhi)。然而，他虽偶尔陶醉于欣喜中，这种标签却令他烦恼。他第一个表示自己并非圣人。毕竟，他支持过非国大的“武装斗争”策略，即便此举最初在很大程度上是名过于实。他为了终结种族隔离的事业，而忽视了家庭，为此在后来的生活中遗憾不已。归根结底，他是极富有人情味的人，热爱生活和欢笑，但也拥有与其他人一样的弱点和缺陷。
Desmond Tutu, his friend and fellow Nobel Peace laureate, was one of the first to question the world’s sanctification of “Madiba” – his clan name, and how he liked to be known. Archbishop Tutu appreciated long before it became a commonplace that the cult of Mandela risked blinding people to the colossal problems facing South Africa. “He is only one pebble on the beach, one of thousands,” he said halfway through Mandela’s term in office. “Not an insignificant pebble, I’ll grant you that, but a pebble all the same.”
曼德拉的朋友、同为诺贝尔和平奖得主的德斯蒙德•图图(Desmond Tutu)是最先质疑世界上将“马迪巴”(Madiba)神圣化的人——马迪巴是曼德拉的族名，也是他喜欢的称呼。早在其他人普遍认识到问题之前，图图大主教便发现，对曼德拉的狂热崇拜可能让人们忽视南非面临的巨大问题。“他只是沙滩上的一颗卵石，成千上万颗卵石中的一颗，”图图在曼德拉担任总统期间曾说道，“我向你保证，他不是一颗显眼的卵石，但他还是颗卵石。”
The “Arch” was right. The otherworldly image of Mandela may have been what the world wanted to believe but, great humanitarian and moral authority as he was, he was foremost a brilliant politician. Reconciliation was not a spontaneous miracle, as some imagined, emanating from the magnificence of his soul. Rather, the seduction of the Afrikaners was plotted in his cell as a way to win power. He pondered many times that his long imprisonment gave him the time to reflect on how he should lead. It was there that he urged fellow prisoners to learn Afrikaans, on the theory you could better defeat your enemy if you spoke their language.
大主教说得对。或许世界愿意相信曼德拉具有这般超凡的形象，但不论他在人道主义和道德方面是多么伟大的楷模，他首先是一位出色的政治家。与一些人的想象不同，民族和解不是源自崇高灵魂而自发产生的奇迹。相反，曼德拉在监狱里便在筹划通过劝诱南非白人来赢得权力。他思考过许多次；长期的监禁，让他有充分的时间考虑应当如何领导运动。在监狱里，他鼓励狱友们学习南非荷兰语。他的理论是，如果会说敌人的语言，便有更大的胜算战胜敌人。
“I knew that people expected me to harbour anger towards whites,” Mandela later wrote when recalling the morning after his release. “But I had none. In prison my anger towards whites decreased but my hatred for the system grew.”
“我知道，人们期待我怨恨白人，”曼德拉后来曾这样回忆自己出狱后的那个上午，“但我没有。在监狱里，我对白人的愤恨减少了，但我对制度的憎恶增加了。”
Twenty-three years later, the “rainbow nation”, as Archbishop Tutu exuberantly labelled the post-apartheid society, is still a work in progress. While relations are transformed, South Africa remains riven by racial and socioeconomic inequality. It was always going to take more than an inspirational leader to overcome the legacy of centuries of discrimination. Yet by force of personality and example, Mandela encouraged the belief that reconciliation really was possible.
23年后的今天，当日被图图大主教兴奋地称之为“后种族隔离”社会“彩虹之国”的南非仍然道路漫长。虽然种族关系得到改变，但南非仍被种族与社会经济不平等割裂。克服几百年歧视的后遗症，不能只靠一位鼓舞人心的领导人。不过曼德拉的确依靠人格和榜样的力量，增强了人们对民族和解可能性的信念。
Sometimes there was a touch of theatre to his drive, such as when he invited the widows and wives of former Afrikaner Nationalist leaders to tea at his residence. Some in the ANC suggested he had gone too far when he travelled to a remote whites-only settlement to visit Betsy Verwoerd, whose husband Hendrik had provided the ideological underpinning of apartheid and enacted some of its most repressive laws. A wrinkled 94-year-old, she spoke with a quavering voice as she offered him coffee and syrupy koeksisters. At an impromptu press conference on her stoep in searing heat, a black journalist pointedly insinuated that Mandela was frittering away his time in office. He replied testily that his drive had cost him little time and yet bound the nation together.
有时候他的举动有一些表演的意味，比如当他邀请南非白人政党——南非国民党(National Party)前领导人的遗孀和妻子前往自己的住处喝茶的时候。非国大的一些人认为，当他长途跋涉来到白人居住区拜访贝齐•维沃尔德(Betsy Verwoerd)的时候，他做得有些过火，因为她的丈夫亨德里克•维沃尔德(Hendrik Verwoerd)为种族隔离制度奠定了理论基础，并实施了一些最严厉的种族隔离法律。94岁高龄的贝齐满脸皱纹，嗓音颤抖地说着话，并给曼德拉端上了咖啡和油炸糖浆面圈。曼德拉冒着炙热高温在贝齐屋前的门廊上举行了一场临时记者招待会。一位黑人记者在会上含沙射影地说道，曼德拉浪费了办公时间。曼德拉恼火地回应道，他的举动没有耗费多少时间，却让国家团结在一起。
Mandela knew how important it was to keep Afrikaners loyal. He also knew South Africa could ill-afford what had happened at independence in neighbouring Mozambique: a mass exodus of whites with their skills and capital. So he masked his anger over the past. His campaign reached its zenith in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a project of astonishing ambition aimed at exorcising the troubled past. Then there was the 1995 Rugby World Cup when he won the hearts of so many Afrikaners with his adoption of “their” game, rugby, inspiring the Springboks to victory against the favourites, all but by his exuberant passion alone.
曼德拉知道让南非白人保持忠诚是多么重要。他也知道南非无法承受邻国莫桑比克独立时的局面：大量白人带着他们的技术和资本离开莫桑比克。因此他藏起了自己对过去的不满。他的“真相与和解委员会”(Truth and Reconciliation Commission)将和解运动推向了高潮。“真相与和解委员会”的伟大抱负在于赶走不愉快的过去。接着到了1995年橄榄球世界杯(Rugby World Cup)，曼德拉赢得了如此多南非白人的心——他支持“他们的”橄榄球比赛，激励南非跳羚队(Springboks)击败了众多夺冠热门球队，所有这一切仅仅是靠他洋溢在外的热情做到的。
So what was the secret to the “Madiba magic” and his seduction routine? Intrinsic to his genius was his Protean persona. One day he came across as an old-fashioned aristocrat, another as an impassioned revolutionary leader, and the third as a world statesman. While like any experienced politician he knew how to play an audience, unlike so many leaders in the age of television there was little artifice about his guises.
那么“马迪巴魔力”和他劝诱南非白人的秘诀是什么？他最根本的天才在于表现出丰富多变的形象。某一天他像老派的贵族，另一天又是充满激情的革命领导人，再一天又成了世界政治家。尽管与所有经验丰富的政治家一样，曼德拉知道如何打动听众，但与电视时代的许多领导人不同的是，他的表现一点也不显刻意做作。
Rather, they were rooted in his extraordinary life. In his lectures to angry “comrades”, his genes as the scion of chiefs were to the fore. It was as if he were upbraiding a rowdy village assembly, as his forefathers must have done in the past.
相反，他的一举一动全都植根于他的传奇生活。当他对着愤怒的“同志们”演讲时，他作为酋长后裔的基因凸显了出来。他的样子就像是在训斥一群吵闹的村民，他的祖先必定也这么做过。
Drawing on the precepts he learnt as a child, and also from his missionary teachers, he had an old-world charm. He could be a stickler for protocol. He chided MPs in the German Bundestag for not wearing ties and lectured his ministers and ANC members on punctuality. Yet this was the man who launched a sartorial revolution with his loose-flowing “Madiba shirts” and who was famous for his abhorrence of pomposity and love of the gentle tease. Who else could telephone the Queen and address her as “Elizabeth”?
他从孩童时期就学到一些信条，从他的传教老师那里也学到一些，这些信条让他拥有老派的传统魅力。他有时可能会严格遵循礼仪。他曾指责德国联邦议员不打领带，并要求他的部长和非国大党员们守时。然而正是这样一个人，却穿着宽松飘逸的“马迪巴衬衫”发起了一场衣着革命，并以憎恶浮华和喜欢轻松调侃而闻名。还有谁能够给英国女王打电话，称呼她“伊丽莎白”？
The ability to make people like you is merely the first lesson for aspirant politicians. But even so, Mandela had a particular genius for the glad-handing side of politics, primarily because his warmth seemed genuinely uncontrived. His smile and laugh exuded the joy of one who appreciated every day as a boon.
对有抱负的政治家而言，有能力让人们喜欢你只是第一课。但曼德拉在发出政治家式的热情问候时仍表现出格外的天赋，这主要是因为他的热情看上去确实不是装出来的。他的微笑和爽朗的笑声散发出由衷的快乐——这是一个将每天视为上帝恩惠的人。
His presidency was not an unalloyed golden age, as his friends concede. He had an autocratic streak. He neglected key policy areas, most critically the fight against HIV/Aids, an omission for which he berated himself in retirement. He had concluded on Robben Island that when in power he should adopt the consensual politics of his forebears’ royal household. This eased the smooth running of the ANC, an amalgam of races, classes, religions and politics, but he was too loyal to underperforming ministers.
他的总统任期并非完美无瑕，正如他的朋友不情愿地承认的那样。他有独裁的倾向。他忽视了关键的政策领域，尤其是在抗击艾滋病方面——他在离任后对这一疏漏自责不已。曼德拉在罗本岛监狱时就断定，如果能够掌握权力，他应该采用他的王室祖先实行的共识政治。这有利于由不同种族、阶级、宗教和政治背景的人组成的非国大平稳运转，但对于不称职的部长们，他也过于忠诚了。
There were other blemishes. As the years passed it emerged he had had to make his share of compromises. His close relationships with business people were from time to time called into question. He also displayed an almost naive tolerance for the fawning of celebrities. To the distress of some advisers, the first big celebration of his 90th birthday occurred on a London stage alongside the scandal-wracked Amy Winehouse.
曼德拉还有其他瑕疵。随着时间的推移，他不得不做出自己的让步。他与商界人士的密切关系不时引发质疑。他还对名人们的讨好表现出近乎天真的容忍。让一些顾问感到痛苦的是，在曼德拉90岁生日于伦敦举行的首场大型庆典上，丑闻缠身的艾米•怀恩豪斯(Amy Winehouse)也出现在舞台上。
Yet as South Africa falters at confronting some of the messy issues of the post-apartheid era, his record rightly appears if anything more magical even than when he was president. His ANC generation has a mythical status: Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and so many more. Amid the intermittent stumbles of his successors, the benefits of South Africa’s having embarked on democracy under a man who led with such clarity and principle were all the clearer.
当南非跌跌撞撞地遭遇后种族隔离时代的一些麻烦时，曼德拉担任总统时的历史甚至显得愈加神奇。他那一代的非国大党员都是神话般的人物：曼德拉、奥利弗•坦博(Oliver Tambo)、沃尔特•西苏鲁(Walter Sisulu)等等许多人。当他的继任者不时地遭遇挫折时，南非早已在曼德拉明确而有原则的领导下实行民主的好处，便更加凸现出来。
The failure of leadership is arguably the greatest curse to have afflicted sub-Saharan Africa since it won independence. The history of the continent in the second half of the 20th century is littered with the examples of “big men” independence leaders who came to power vowing to liberate their people from the tyranny of the colonial past and then never left office, invariably deploying the rhetoric of liberation to justify misdeeds. The lesson was clear: once undermined, the independence of democratic institutions is hard to recover.
领导失败可以说是自撒哈拉以南非洲地区独立以来遭受的最大诅咒。这片大陆在20世纪后半叶的历史充斥着这样的例子：那些领导独立运动的“大人物”上台时，承诺将本国人民从殖民地专制统治下解放出来，之后却绝不下台，千篇一律地以解放为由为其种种恶行辩解。教训是清楚的：一旦民主机构的独立性遭到破坏，便很难恢复。
So Mandela’s unflinching support for the independence of the courts, the media and state institutions set a vital precedent. He respected their rulings even when white judges from the old era ruled in favour of apartheid leaders. He himself appeared in court when subpoenaed in a dispute over the national rugby squad – and more agonisingly when petitioning for divorce from his second wife, Winnie. For such a private man it was patently painful to have to testify about the intimacies of their relationship. Yet there he stood, stiffly upright in the simple courtroom, testifying in a quavering voice, as the law required.
因此曼德拉对法院、媒体和国家机构独立性的坚定支持确立了一个重要的先例。即便旧时代的白人法官做出过有利于种族隔离领导人的判决，他也尊重这些判决。他自己也曾亲自出庭应诉，一次是因一场围绕国家橄榄球队的争议而接到法院传票，另一次更令他痛苦的是，第二任妻子温妮(Winnie)要求离婚。对这样一个退隐的人来说，出庭阐述两人的婚姻关系显然非常痛苦。然而他站到了那里，按照法律的要求，笔直地站在简朴的法庭上，以颤抖的声音讲述证词。
Strikingly, he did not indulge in the ruinous relativism that had led to so many abuses in Africa passing unrebuked in the continent. But most important of all, he believed in leading by example. He was the last of Africa’s liberation leaders to take charge and was acutely aware of the need to buck their trend by serving just one term. It was a parting gift of incalculable value to a fledgling democracy. He was indeed the father of the nation.
更引人注目的是，他没有让自己沉溺于破坏力巨大的相对主义（导致了新种族主义，编者注）。相对主义在非洲大陆导致了大量任意妄为，它们甚至没有受到责难。但最重要的是，他信奉以身作则。他是非洲解放运动领导人中最后一位掌权的，并且敏锐地意识到有必要抵制长期掌权的趋势，因此只担任了一任总统。它是曼德拉赠送给南非新生民主体制的礼物，价值无法估量。他实际上是南非之父。
Don’t put me on a pedestal, I am human, he liked to say. He once bemoaned his image as a demigod. Yet who could dispute that he presides over the pantheon of great leaders of the 20th century?
他喜欢说，别盲目崇拜我，我只是个普通人。他曾经为自己半人半神的形象哀叹。然而谁又能否认，在20世纪最伟大的领导人中，他的确是首屈一指的？
The writer, the FT’s news editor, was a correspondent in South Africa from 1993 to1998 and 2006 to 2008
本文作者是英国《金融时报》新闻编辑，曾于1993-1998年和2006-2008年在南非担任记者。